Shutting down the internet
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 27 June 2019
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Governments in Africa and elsewhere are routinely shutting off the iInternet in the name of national security. It is having a significant economic impact. Ed Butler speaks to Dr Dawit Bekele, bureau director for Africa at the Internet Society, and Berhan Taye, an Ethiopian campaigner at Access Now, a global digital rights group. Otto Akama, editor of a technology blog in Cameroon called Afro Hustler, and Darrell West, director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Brookings Institution, discuss the effect these shutdowns have on business and the economy.
(Photo: A demonstration by Zimbabwean citizens in Pretoria earlier this year. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:05.7 | Today, how the growing wave of internet shutdowns by African governments |
| 0:10.5 | has become a blight on the continent's development. |
| 0:13.5 | Some people have gone out of the country to Europe and to the US. |
| 0:16.8 | It was really, really difficult on us. |
| 0:19.9 | Trade got really slow and it began creating poverty. |
| 0:25.4 | Is anyone fighting to protect Africa's access to the web? |
| 0:29.2 | There's definitely a pushback from investors, from civil society, from businesses and foreign governments. |
| 0:35.0 | But for now, you're saying it's a losing battle. |
| 0:37.4 | It is. It is definitely a losing battle. |
| 0:40.5 | That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:49.1 | The sound there of live rounds being fired by the Zimbabwean security forces on the streets of Harari |
| 0:55.8 | in January this year. |
| 0:57.8 | The government was responding to popular protests around a hike in fuel prices. Several |
| 1:03.9 | demonstrators died. At the same time, the government also resorted to another means to quell |
| 1:09.3 | the public unrest. It shut down all access to |
| 1:12.3 | the internet in the country. Government spokesman Xavier Zavare spoke to the BBC's Emily Maitlis |
| 1:18.0 | at the time. It's one thing crying for the internet. I'm sure any investor or any business |
| 1:24.4 | would really invest in Zimbabwe even without the internet. |
| 1:29.3 | Really? You think your government could shut down the internet and then invite people to come to the |
| 1:34.3 | country with the most expensive fuel and no means of communication? |
| 1:37.3 | But what is important here is we have roads being barricaded. We have buildings being torched on fire. It is a matter of |
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